Quotes and Links

A week in review

Joe Biden speaks at the Democratic National Committee's holiday reception in Washington, DC, on Sunday, Dec. 15, 2024. | ABC News

Note for new subscribers: On Fridays I send out a post with a list of notable quotes from the past week, along with links to some of the best reading material I’ve come across. You can opt out of these posts by simply clicking on the top right and going to “manage subscription.”

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• “MAGA women, including Fox News, dress like escorts, and seem happy to have no real power.” — Democratic political strategist Cheri Jacobus

• “This [COVID-19] was briefed in October and November 2019 as a lab leak. It’s important that people realise. It was in the intelligence. We briefed it. It was accepted. I briefed it numerous times about a viral outbreak and that it was from a lab. Over the course of late November and December, it probably came up six or seven times in briefings. Nobody said, ‘hey I heard that was not true, it was not from a lab.’ It was just stated as fact.” — Retired Pentagon intelligence official Jon Myers, in an interview with The Sun

• “Musk is running the show and he’s going to crash it, just like he did Tesla. If you want Rs to accomplish nothing he’s the perfect person to have Trump’s ear.” — The Washington Post’s Jen Rubin; Tesla hit a $1.5 trillion valuation this week, and analysts believe it will hit $2.0 trillion by 2025

• “The scariest words you’ll hear from a voter: ‘I do my own research.’” — Also Jen Rubin

• “‘Woke’ is not just racial code, but indeed gendered: Black Lives Matter, #Metoo, etc emphasized a politics of empathy and care for the victims of America’s white patriarchal systems.” — The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah

• “I am a brown woman, daughter of immigrants, and I would feel unsafe.” — Democratic Rep. Delia Ramirez, on why she won’t be attending Trump’s inauguration

• “What media are you talking about that’s ‘anti-Trump’”? — Democratic strategist Julie Roginsky, who posed the question to Scott Jennings during a CNN panel

• “Personally, I think [Kamala] should run for president again if she believes she has the energy to do it.” — CNN’s Karen Finney

• “My Neighbor Won’t Stop Praying for Me. What Should I Do?” — NYT headline

• “There’s just no value — with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election, to speaking to The New York Times or speaking to The Washington Post, because those are already with us.” — Rob Flaherty, Kamala’s deputy campaign manager, during an interview with Semafor

• “Very surprising that there would be a mass shooting at a Christian school, given that lack of prayer is often blamed for these horrible events. Is it possible they weren’t praying enough, or correctly, despite being a Christian school?” — Progressive radio host David Pakman

• “We’ve run a campaign that’s basically scandal free. That’s hard to do in American politics.” — Joe Biden, speaking at the DNC Holiday Reception

• “I am pretty confident that it will soon become the law that any effort to remedy racial inequality, private or public, will be illegal anti-white discrimination. Fairness is, of course, when our institutions are lily white and male.” — NYT’s Jamelle Bouie

• “I watched a whole Joe Rogan show and realized that, like Tucker, he only invites pro-Russian guests on and then says ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.’” — University of Missouri-Columbia professor Karen Piper

• “And let’s remember who else has been given this title in year’s past in the same category: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Vladimir Putin.” — MSNBC’s Joy Reid, on Donald Trump being named Time’s Person of the Year

• “A lot of Democrats’ problem is that voters see through the surface rhetoric and recognize that Democratic elites see them as plebes and look down on them. Language is a very rich medium, even more so if you include things like body language. People often infer the unspoken message even when you’re trying to conceal it, especially when there’s an element of contempt. The implicit message of a lot [of] the recent Discourse among Democrats is ‘How can we get these idiots to vote for us?’ and the answer may be that the first step is to understand that they’re not idiots.” — Nate Silver

• “The whole thing would instantly implode and the majority of users would break limbs as they frantically and neurotically smashed the BLOCK button over and over and over. Mass psychosis would ensue.” — Glenn Greenwald, on what would happen if Trump created a Bluesky account

• “What noises do you think Donald Trump makes when he ejaculates?” — American film director and Democratic activist Morgan J. Freeman

• “If I don’t go to the hospital for a whole year, where is my money? Why don’t you give me the money back?” — The View’s Whoopi Goldberg, regarding health insurance

• “The big issue is I’m really, really sick and tired of every time I turn around, I’m finding something else that the Democrats have lied about or downplayed or misrepresented along the way. We can argue policies. We can argue politics all day long. But the Democrats worked really, really diligently to make the case that the right had a monopoly on insidious, evil tendencies. Corrupt tendencies. Duplicitous, hypocritical, untruthful tendencies and every time they made those accusations. We turn around and find out that at least some of them are guilty of the same shit. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m sick of all of it.” — ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, regarding the DOJ IG report confirming that there were dozens of FBI confidential sources at the January 6th Capitol riot

• “We have to face the fact that The New York Times has been fully taken over by MAGA.” — Keith Olbermann

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• The Wall Street Journal: “How the White House Functioned With a Diminished Biden in Charge”

• The Wall Street Journal: “The Extreme Holiday Decorators Spending Thousands to Deck ‘Every Nook and Cranny’ of Their Homes”

• Business Insider: “How rich musicians billed American taxpayers for luxury hotels, shopping sprees, and million-dollar bonuses”

• The New Yorker: “A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder”

• The New Yorker: “Have the Democrats Become the Party of the Élites?”

• ESPN: “Inside Army-Navy: A day in the life of students at the service academies”

• The New York Times: “An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones”